This past weekend I celebrated my birthday with a murder mystery dinner. My first official party since my 21st birthday brunch. My man chose the theme for the party and facilitated it for me. He made sure everyone was forwarded their characters and info that they needed to make the evening a success.

My job was to organise the decor for the party and the other small details. The theme was “Origami and the Gentle Art of Murder”. My mind started buzzing with ideas for the decor, I googled origami projects and then set about testing my origami skills. My first project was a cube using sonobe units. I set about doing this and loved the challenge and ended up with a pretty awesome cube. Inspired by this I searched for other ideas and things to make for the table decor and room decor. The internet has thousands and thousands of ideas and tutorials. I downloaded and printed some simple ideas and armed with a ream of paper set about making some cranes and pelicans. My character for the murder mystery dinner was responsible for using origami as a rehabilitation tool at the local prison and the prisoners were working on folding a 1000 paper cranes for a special project in Japan. I wanted to make some cranes and hang them up for display purposes.

I need to back track a bit and say that last 2 weeks ago I was struck down with migraine type headaches that lasted for ten days. My man was on a training trip to Nigeria the weekend before my party so I decided to spend the weekend in bed folding paper, in the hope of kicking my headaches. Now for anyone who suffers from bad headaches and migraines know just how debilitating this can be, for a day or two after the headache/migraine you feel rather fragile, well I felt as though an 18 wheeler had ridden over me and then reversed just for good measure. So sitting in bed I was attempting to make the A4 sheets into squares and had a production line going of folding the cranes to a certain point and leaving the remaining folding for the following week.

On Monday bright and early I collected my man from the airport and went home. Very proudly I show him my masterpieces and explain that I will complete the folding of the cranes during the week. While talking to him he casually picks up one and very quickly completes the crane! I was gobsmacked as I had been very carefully following my googled step-by-step video. I forgot that when he was a child his mom bought him an origami book and he is very good at origami. Then he proceeded to inspect my half folded cranes. The long and short of it was that my folding really sucked and my lines were not crisp and he told me off … I wasn’t mad at him for doing this, he was right, the secret of origami is a perfect square and crisp lines. (My 10 days of headaches is been blamed for my poor folding techniques.)

I decided to recycle my 50 half folded cranes and start again. So instead of having 50 cranes in my display I landed up with 8 perfectly folded cranes, about 50 pelicans (much easier to make) and a host of other stunning paper decorations. I made some fantastic paper daisies and made a ‘curtain’ of hanging flowers. I also made some really easy paper lanterns using strip of paper, very effective, will definitely use them for other functions. For the table we folded paper napkins into Lotus Blossoms, and it looked so pretty. The ream of paper I bought consisted of 5 bright colours – red, orange, blue, green and yellow. These colours made the decorations look bright and cheerful. The total cost of the decor was R60, the cost of the ream of paper! The reward for me was priceless.

The problem with me when I start something like this is that my creative juices start flowing and I am continually finding more and more things I want to make for decor and I have to stop myself from going overboard and exhausting myself. I now have a host of paper creations that I am planning to work on during the course of the year, simply for my own satisfaction and to show my craft ladies how simple it is to make some decorations for any occasion from ordinary paper.